Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Collaboratory: Outreach, Infrastructure and Maintenance

Abstract The NeuroImaging Tools and Resources Collaboratory (NITRC) is an established and award-winning (2009 Excellence.gov award and 2015 HHS Innovates award) repository of information and support for resources relevant to a broad set of neuroimaging domains and their communities of developers and users. Resources hosted on NITRC Resources (NITRC-R) include software, hardware, and test datasets; data sets are hosted publicly in NITRC Image Repository (NITRC-IR), and cloud-based virtual computational processing is provided by NITRC Computational Environment (NITRC-CE). The purpose of NITRC is to provide neuroscience researchers with a complete solution to the problem of finding, developing, and sharing neuroimaging and neuroinformatics software tools, finding and sharing large-scale imaging datasets, and manipulating the software and the data in high-performance computing environments. NITRC will continue to be a framework where researchers can identify software and data and seamlessly deliver them to local or cloud-based computational resources for processing. This will be accomplished through the execution of aims designed to provide: 1) Content and user maintenance for the established NITRC-R, IR and CE environments; 2) infrastructure maintenance for the complete development and deployment environments; 3) content expansion in the existing domains, and identification of new areas that are amenable to NITRC support; and 4) outreach, user documentation, training, and support for the established NITRC user base. This continued effort will greatly enhance the delivery of high-performance computing to the large-scale datasets that are becoming the mainstay of neuroscience research and promote more reproducible publication practices through enhanced resource sharing.